“But tournament fighting is different, right? I’ve heard that a lot. You just need some seasoning is all. And you’re better at being a vampire than me by a long shot.” Shamira ripped open her snack food. “You’re not the one who got herself locked up for ignoring the boss. You aren’t the one that pissed off just about everyone at one time or another.”
“But that’s because I just kind of go with the flow,” Bunny said as the van started up again. “You . . . I mean, you just take on everything. And maybe you get moody or angry or piss some people off, but you always get back on the horse. Usually, you beat it into submission. And Clara loves you,” she stammered a bit. “She doesn’t even LIKE me –”
“She does too like you,” Shamira said, her heart warming at what Bunny had said. “She may not want to, but she does,” she added with a grin. “You and she are just very different personalities.”
“You think so?”
“I’m pretty sure.”
Bunny smiled. “You DO spend more time with her than anyone else. What’s being in love like?”
“I . . . I really can’t explain it,” Shamira replied, getting on the highway. “It’s new for me, and this is kind of my first time for it.”
Bunny looked starry eyed. “A love virgin?” Her bottom lip actually trembled, and she lunged across the seats to hug the driver, almost sending them hurtling off the road.
“Bunny . . . need to drive!” Shamira said as she disentangling herself from her young partner.
They drove in relative peace for the next hour, but never in quiet. Bunny simply had no conversational off switch that Shamira could tell. Shamira felt this would have been a great girl to have slumber parties with back when she was younger, if anyone had ever invited her to such things.
Shamira pulled the van into the warehouse dictated by the van’s navigation system. No sooner had she pulled up that the van was surrounded by Shane’s people, some remote and some from the house. Yosyp and Sebastian were the first two to reach through the window and hug her. They did not say anything at first, and neither did she. She was tempted to cry a little though. She had been a pain in the ass to this house since she had arrived, but it was still home. These guys were family, even the ones she had known for less than a month.
She got into her wheelchair and wheeled to the side-door, finding Bangaly and a couple of Shane’s remote personnel were standing there. Bunny got out of the car and gave the big black enforcer a hungry gaze. Shamira grinned. She and Bunny had talked some about what each woman most fantasized about if they could pull it off . . . sexually speaking . . . and Bunny’s idea were quite elaborate, athletic, and involved a number of muscular Nubian gods and goddesses.
“So, who we got for transport?” Shamira asked.
Sebastian looked over at the van. “We’ll get them loaded on and give you a manifest. This group is low level operatives for the most part. It took us a bit before we could get Banshee to stop killing the more important personnel.”
“I heard she took . . . stuff . . . kind of personally.”
“That’s like saying that a hurricane is kind of windy.” Sebastian hugged Shamira again.
“What’s going on in Savannah?”
Bangaly sat down next to her on a stack of crates. “The enemy has gone to ground. He managed to sneak in supplies through the docks, but we have since closed that avenue of approach.”
“Lacroix can hide out for months at least, even if he were at full staff,” Yosyp added. “Which he is not.”
Shamira felt better all of a sudden. Getting back to work was what she needed. “I really don’t think Lacroix is the problem,” she said, steel in her tone. “Jonas made it sound pretty clear that Lacroix is more like a figurehead. He and . . . that elf talked about him like a child or a dog that they had to keep track of.”
“Regardless, Lacroix is a powerful warrior and if he’s hyped up on morning star, he would still be dangerous.”
“But what are they waiting for?” Shamira asked.
“I don’t know,” Sebastian said, standing behind her and rubbing her powerful shoulders. “I hate to say that he can’t possibly win, but he CAN’T. He’s surrounded, cut off from any source of supplies, cut off from finances, and no one is even remotely stupid enough to try and bust through the blockade. The guys from Florida and Alabama are looking to get in Shane’s good graces thanks to his connections to the Tribunal, and they’re pissed that this has been going on right under everyone’s noses.”
“I thought at least one or two of his men would have defected by now,” Bangaly said in that deep, rich voice of his.
“Can he teleport out?” Shamira asked. “Magic?”
“No way. Even if he had anyone around who could cast something like that, there’s no way to transport multiple people over large distances without one hell of a power source, and we’ve got the property warded on top of it all.” Sebastian’s hands were magical on Shamira’s shoulders as he talked. “Face it, you’re the only person who could cover any real distance anyway, and I’m willing to bet just about anything that they don’t have a shadow jumper on their team.”
She rubbed her temples, trying hard to remember something that Jonas had said in the bowels of the bleeding room. “Insurance policy.”
“What?”
“Jonas mentioned something about an insurance policy,” she replied softly, her mind attempting to go places that she never wanted to revisit.
Sebastian’s hands slowed for a moment, but then started easing the tension in her neck. “Did he say what it was?”
“No. And even though he didn’t see me as a threat, he didn’t want me to hear him talk about it. What could they possibly have that would make them think they had a chance? What could they do? Are they all on the damn drug? No, Jonas seemed too rational.”
Sebastian would have smiled if it weren’t obvious how difficult it was for Shamira to relive her memories. Less than two weeks ago, she had been tortured unmercifully, and now she was here trying to reclaim what was stolen from her. Her life.
——— ——————
Back in Atlanta . . .
——— ——————
They crew had not had much success in divining Lacroix’s (and by proxy Jonas’s) plans, so Shamira and Bunny had hauled a load of prisoners back up to the house in Atlanta where the security team and the Representative’s people took them into custody to “discuss” their wrongdoings. This time around, Shamira did not feel a great deal of sympathy for the captives, but Shane had still promised to be much easier on them than Daniel had been to her.
“Where IS Shane?” she muttered as the werelionesses Barbara and Kira . . . “Hey, your name is Kira!”
“So nice of you to notice,” the supple blond noticed with a smirk.
“No . . . sorry, I mean . . . One of my donors is names Kira. I just . . . it’s not THAT common of a name,” she continued. “I’ll stop talking now.”
“It’s okay. We haven’t really had much chance to spend time together since we got here. Things have been . . . busy.”
“Yeah, I suppose. I just feel so out of it.”
THIS Kira roughly threw the last prisoner to the ground, then shoved her forward with one shapely leg. “You have had a lot on your mind. Oh, you mentioned Shane. He said he wanted to see you as soon as you got back. He’s down in his studio.”
‘Crap,’ Shamira thought. For once, she was not annoyed because she thought she was in trouble, but rather because Shane’s “studio” mean that he was entertaining a submissive, which she was not sure she could handle despite her claims to Clara. It also meant navigating a wheelchair down a spiral staircase. “We really need an elevator,” she muttered as she made her way into the house. She got to the door and found a note on it.
“Look with your Shadow Sight,” she read aloud. She concentrated, peering through all the shadows of the house. At the bottom of the stairs, there was another wheelchair in the darkened antechamber just outside of Shane’s playroom. That room itself was lit, so she saw nothing in it. Shamira rolled back to her chambers and parked her current chair in the bathroom, locking the door and turning out the light, then jumping downstairs to the waiting chair.
She rolled up to the door and started to knock, but Shane’s voice telling her to come in cut her hand off before it even swung. So Shamira’s hand came to gently rest on the door handle. She did not want to open that door. Yes, she did. Did she want to see what he was doing? No. Yes. Participate? She was not ready. But she wanted it. She opened the door, and her jaw almost fell off of her face.